Unexpected Consequences
by Art-Over-Matter
Summary: Previously, Ian and Anthony were pitted against Mark Fischbach, but now they'll have to work together, or Anthony, Ian, and everyone they know could be killed... This is the sequel to Unexpected Encounter, but you could read it without reading that one if you want. Rated T for coarse language, violence, and mild gore.
1. Chapter 1

"If I stop, I'm going to lose him, Anthony," Ian warned, not slowing down as they approached the intersection.

"He'll be there. I know you don't want to wait, but he'll be there."

"Why do you even think that?" Ian asked, not challenging Anthony as much as expressing his curiosity. He started to press the brake as they came up on the corner of the sidewalk. "You don't even really know him."

"No, but I still trust he'll be there," Anthony answered without a real explanation.

Ian slowed the car to a stop, watching the bumper of the red Cadillac in front of them grow smaller as it continued, exceeding the speed limit, down the lonely road.

Ian glanced around outside the car, searching for the passenger they were supposed to pick up right here. There were only two buildings at the intersection—they were at the very edge of a tiny nowheresville town—that could block his view, so clearly he wasn't here.

"He's not here, Anthony. We need to go."

Anthony shrugged, sighing. "Fine. But we could stand backup."

Ian shifted the car back to first gear and started to drive again as a blue sedan pulled up next to him across the double yellow. He frowned without thinking much of it, expecting it to be an idiot trying to illegally pass him.

But the car honked and stayed next to him, its passenger side window rolling down. Ian slowed down and rolled his own window down, glowering. He heard Anthony shift next to him and a click as he turned the safety off his gun. Not a bad idea, since the car next to them could probably only mean trouble.

"Sorry I'm a bit late," the deep-voiced man said from across the empty passenger seat. "Once I realized you'd be pursuing them in a vehicle, I thought I'd be most useful if I had one of my own."

Ian raised his eyebrows. "Well, you're probably not wrong. Nice to see you showed up, by the way, Mark. But let's not fall behind. The bastard's already speeding."

"Lead the way," Mark said, letting his car drift behind Ian's.

Ian rolled the window back up and gunned his Subaru, keeping track of the Cadillac in the distance. Fortunately, the road was long and straight without many turnoffs, so it would be hard to miss if the red coupe left the road.

"Told you he'd come," Anthony said, clicking the safety back on his pistol.

Ian cast him an insincerely annoyed look. "I never said he wouldn't."

Anthony frowned. "Actually, you did say something to that effect."

Ian didn't grace that with an answer.

As he approached the rear of the Cadillac, the luxury car's driver must have noticed his proximity. It started to speed up, and as Ian followed, his speedometer pushed eighty mph.

Not good for a highway whose speed limit was fifty, but Ian just had to hope no cops were around.

He switched lanes across the double yellow and went to pull up next to the red coupe.

"Ian, don't you think that's a bad idea?" Anthony said, sounding slightly worried. "What if someone came from this direction?"

"Shut up, I know it's stupid," Ian said, anxiety twisting his gut as he imagined getting trapped by the Cadillac and Mark Fischbach's car as a semi-truck came from the opposite direction….

He shook his head fiercely and returned to focus on the task at hand. With any luck, Mark would pick up on what he was doing here and help him. Hopefully, this would be fast.

Ian edged his car closer to the Cadillac. The coupe started to slow down, trying to fall behind Ian, but Mark's blue sedan didn't allow it to. Thankfully, their comrade seemed to have pick up on at least some idea of what Ian was doing.

"Ian, there's a tunnel up ahead. The lanes split."

"Oh, shit," Ian responded, taking his eyes off the Cadillac and looking to the road in front of them. Surely enough, the lane Ian was in went off slightly to the left, avoiding the tunnel, and the right lane proceeded straight into the dimly lit cave in the hill.

"Just leave it, Ian," Anthony said, and Ian could see his serious gaze in his peripheral vision. "Get behind Mark or in front of this bastard. You can't stay right here."

Ian gave him no reply. Instead, he started to crowd the Cadillac further, until it was riding the rumble strip.

"Please don't run him off the road," Anthony said stiffly. "That would be a—"

"Shut up," Ian said, trying not to snap at him. "Let me concentrate." He was working over his plan in his head and realizing it wasn't going to work like this. And he had to think fast, because they were approaching the tunnel at seventy-five miles an hour.

He started to slow down, hoping Mark would get the idea and slow down with him. It took a few seconds of Ian vacillating his speed for Mark to pick up on it, but eventually the three cars started to slow. The Cadillac was too trapped between Ian and the edge of the road to keep up its own speed, so it was forced to go with them.

"Anthony, you could just try firing from here," Ian muttered, downshifting as he dropped his speed from sixty to fifty.

"No," his friend said immediately with a glance at the darkly tinted coupe windows. "If I accidentally kill him, his car could fall back and hit Mark's. Or hell, even swerve and hit ours."

"True. We're going to have to do this the hard way."

"Ian, don't try this. I don't want to hit the side of that tunnel."

"Just trust me, Anthony. I'll figure it out."

The tunnel _was _getting disturbingly close, and the cars were still at highway speed, approaching the split of the lanes at a rate that made Ian's heart jump to his throat. But he could still do this, he swore on it.

He turned his head slightly toward Anthony to talk to him. "As soon as he hits the side and stops his car, get out and shoot. I don't want to give him the chance to start—"

"What do you mean, 'hits the side?'"

"—to start up again and leave. You'll know what I mean when it happens." Ian cast a glance over at Anthony and saw his slightly sickened expression. He wasn't at all comfortable with Ian not telling him what exactly was going on.

But Ian didn't have time.

As the tunnel drew closer, Ian's brain worked overtime making sure nothing would go really, really wrong. He needed to time this perfectly.

At the last second, he twitched the steering wheel to the right and his car scraped against the red Cadillac. Ian pulled away immediately as the other car jerked, seemingly involuntarily, to the very edge of the road. Ian hit the brake hard as the Cadillac slid against the side of the tunnel, entering it with a shower of sparks.

Ian's Subaru still had a considerable amount of momentum heading toward and across the median, which was right at the front of the concrete tunnel. Ian saw, from the corner of his eye, Anthony throw his arms up to protect his face. Ian turned the steering wheel hard to the left and half a second later, they had come to a sudden stop with a sickening crunch. It jolted everything inside the vehicle and Ian felt a sharp pain in the back of his neck as he was jerked forward.

Everything was silent for about ten seconds before Ian started to move. He shook his head, trying to get a weird ringing out of his right ear, and looked over to check on Anthony.

It was Anthony's side of the car that had hit the concrete, but to Ian's relief, the inside of the vehicle was unharmed and so was Anthony.

"You okay, dude?" he asked.

Anthony took a deep breath and nodded. Then, without warning, he opened the car door and got out, taking his pistol with him.

_Oh shit, we still have to stop that guy, _Ian realized. He grabbed his own pistol from the door compartment and left his damaged vehicle behind.

_v_

Mark didn't have much time to react when Ian hit the Cadillac at the mouth of the tunnel. The coupe's speed jolted from about forty-five to thirty in just a few seconds as it collided with the side of the tunnel. Mark stepped on the brake to avoid hitting it as sparks flew across the road and onto his sedan's hood. As his surroundings went dim in the faint orange lighting of the tunnel, the blinding shower of sparks blocked his vision. Mark tried to twist his steering wheel in the hopes of going around the wrecked Cadillac, but he didn't have enough time. His car was still coming to a full stop as he heard his bumper screech against the rear of the Cadillac.

When both vehicles were no longer in motion, Mark realized he had his eyes squeezed shut. He opened them in time to see a vague flash of gunfire and hear the accompanying crack of the bullet coming out of what must have been Anthony Padilla's pistol. Some sort of a threat shot to the person in the Cadillac.

_Those two are merciless, aren't they?_

Mark took a moment to relax enough to move. His whole body had been tense and he realized his foot was still pressed down hard on the brake pedal. He shakenly put the sedan in park and twisted around to grab three items from the backseat. Two were his silver-and-black pistols; the other, a black leather mask.

Mark didn't really enjoy covering his face every time he had to go out and do something like this—which he hadn't had to do in many months—but it was justified. With a YouTube channel that had almost 15 million subscribers, the last thing he wanted to do was be recognized by someone while he was on a mission helping these two near-criminals.

He looped the mask's strap around the back of his head and settled it into place around his nose and down around his chin. He shoved a magazine into his pistol and slowly opened his car door, not wanting to idiotically get out into Anthony's line of fire. Anthony didn't seem to be shooting anymore, though, and as Mark got out of the car he noticed that Ian had joined Anthony and they were both headed toward the wreckage of the Cadillac coupe.

"Is the driver still in there?" Mark asked, and his voice, though not loud, echoed down the empty tunnel. He turned his gaze to the smashed, smoking car, then back as Ian spoke.

Ian must have been able to see through the broken windshield into the car, since the windows were too darkly tinted—and now cracked—to make anything out. "She's still alive."

Mark couldn't help but be slightly more repulsed by Ian's actions knowing that it had been a woman in the car the whole time.

Mark and Anthony kept their guns at the ready—not that they believed any real threat could come from inside the vehicle now—as Ian went up and opened the car door. Mark grit his teeth at the sight of the woman inside, who had shards of glass spread across her lap and a bloody gash in her forehead. He was immediately reconsidering if Ian and Anthony's cause was worth fighting for.


	2. Chapter 2

Anthony watched as Ian pulled the woman out of the car—not roughly, he noticed—only getting some weak resistance from her. She looked pretty dazed from the crash.

Ian let her sit down, leaning her back against the car door. She tried to shove him away, but had next to no strength to do so. "Stop fighting me," he told her firmly but gently. "You're not doing yourself any good."

She blinked hazily, glowering, and her eyes slowly focused on Ian's face. She spoke in a surprisingly deep voice that held a hint of an Indian accent. "Who—who are you? What do you want?"

Anthony knelt down beside his friend and holstered his gun.

Ian answered only her second question. "You have a stolen case somewhere. We want it back. Is it in the car?"

She seemed to be slowly losing consciousness, and her head started to loll to the side before Ian caught the side of her face and held it upright. His movement and touch seemed to temporarily bring her back around, and she sneered slightly.

"I don't have it. I was the diversion."

Ian hesitated for a moment, glancing to Anthony, and muttered "fuck" under his breath before looking back to her. "So where is it? Who has the case now?"

She smiled vaguely and looked to her left, out the closest end of the tunnel and past Mark's car. "They do."

With a sudden curl of dread in his stomach, Anthony whipped his head around to see what she was referring to.

It was a mail delivery truck, heading toward the tunnel at highway speed.

From what Anthony could see, the driver wasn't going to slow down.

"Oh, shit," Anthony said, having a moment of stunned immobility before he started to panic. "Ian—"

"I know, I know!" Ian was already moving, grabbing the injured woman under the armpits and starting to drag her toward the mouth of the tunnel.

"No," Mark Fischbach finally spoke up. "You don't have time. Get to the front of the Cadillac—if you're anywhere else, you might get crushed."

Anthony distinctly didn't like the way he said 'you' and not 'we,' but he didn't have time to think about it. He helped Ian pick up the woman, who was as good as unconscious now, and drag her deeper into the tunnel. Anthony set her down and turned back to find where Mark was.

He was still in the middle of the road, his pistol out and aimed at the oncoming truck.

"Mark, move!" Anthony shouted at him over the truck's blaring horn and squealing brakes.

Mark ignored him, remaining completely focused as he fired twice, aiming probably to take out the vehicle's tires.

At the same time as the first shot, the truck crashed into Mark's little sedan.

At the same time as the second shot, the sedan went sailing forward into the Cadillac, which rolled toward Ian and Anthony.

Mark dove out of the way of the truck, throwing himself in front of Ian, Anthony, and the collapsed woman on the ground.

Anthony instinctively threw his arms up in front of his face as shrapnel exploded from the collision. He heard something sudden and loud—maybe the sound of something blowing up—and felt a wave of heat sweep across him.

Then everything went silent.

Anthony slowly brought his arms away from his face and opened his eyes. Mark was in front of him, his back to Anthony and Ian and his arms outstretched as if to protect them. The mail truck was stopped in the tunnel only a few feet from where the three of them stood.

"Mark?" Ian said, his voice the first sound to break through the silence and the ringing in Anthony's ears.

Mark's arms slowly dropped to his side, but he didn't answer.

Anthony stepped out from behind him, trying to see his face to detect what was wrong.

"I'm fine," Mark gasped, suddenly unfrozen, as he stepped back to lean against the concrete wall.

He was anything but fine. Much of the debris that had flown out when the delivery truck had hit the two cars had found its way to somewhere on Mark's body. He was streaked with blood and he had a burn running from the back of his left hand to his elbow. The surface of his black mask was torn, revealing the brown insides of the leather.

Anthony realized immediately that if Mark hadn't made that idiotic move, all of that would have hit him and Ian.

"Jesus Christ, you dumbass," Anthony said, an inexorable sense of guilt washing through him. "W—Why?"

Mark shook his head and waved Anthony off, cringing as he tried to shift his weight off of his left leg. Glancing down, Anthony could see that the front of the Cadillac must have hit him in the side of the leg. He was probably fortunate it wasn't broken—assuming, of course, that it wasn't.

Ian spoke again before Anthony could. He did so while putting a hand on Mark's shoulder. "You don't have to stay around, Mark. If you want to get out of here now, you can do that."

Mark nodded, not really giving an answer, and dropped himself down to sit on the ground. He leaned his head back against the dirty wall, taking a deep breath before saying, "I'm fine. I'll be fine. I'm just—still processing everything."

Still trying to cope with the pain, more like.

_v_

Ian regretted pretty much every decision he'd made on this mission so far. But he didn't let himself think about it. He allowed all his passing regrets to be swept away around the stationary focus in his stream thoughts. The focus—that was, the mission objective.

Before he could get anything else done, Ian checked on the Indian woman, who was still unconscious on the ground.

He picked up her wrist and felt for a pulse. Nothing.

_No. Oh, god, no._

He reached up to her neck and felt for a pulse there. He could feel one along her jugular vein, but it was faint.

"Anthony?" he said, his voice coming out meeker than he wanted it to.

"What?" his best friend replied, coming to kneel next to him.

"I—she—she's dying. I don't know what to do. Sh—should I call an ambulance? Shit. If I do that, our mission is fucked. What're the repercussions if we don't get those stolen documents back?"

Anthony looked at him as if he were insane. "Ian, if anyone gets into that case, our entire organization is dead. You, me, the other agents, management—everyone. We're all either dead or, best-case scenario, in prison."

Ian looked away to hide the anguish in his expression. He already knew the decision he was going to make. He just loathed himself for it.

He took a deep breath, letting his feelings sweep past the rock in the stream. "Alright. I'm leaving her here. We need to go raid that truck and find out where the case is. The driver's probably not terribly injured, though, so we'll have to make sure he doesn't try to stop—" Ian's brain processed too late that Anthony was looking wide-eyed over his shoulder.

"Ian m—" he didn't finish before lunging forward and knocking Ian to the ground as bullets whizzed over their heads.

"Jesus," Ian said, his heart racing. "Movemovemove. We've gotta get behind something."

Trying to stay low to the ground, the two untangled themselves and dove over behind the Cadillac, where Mark had already taken cover.

Their assailant seemed to be the person who had been driving the truck. From what Ian could make out, looking through the half-broken windshield of the red coupe, the man was uninjured. And….

There were more of them. It seemed the back of the truck had held at least four people.

Apparently this had all been rather planned out, and whoever had planned it had considered the possibility of fierce opposition.

"We can't hide back here," Ian decided. "We have to actually fight."

"Ian, is your shotgun in the car?" Anthony asked immediately.

"Yeah, I think so, but you can't—"

Without hesitation, Anthony leapt over the trunk of the coupe and sprinted toward Ian's Subaru, still crashed outside the tunnel. Some shots followed him, but most were still focused on Mark and Ian.

The men with guns weren't just going to stand back and shoot the whole time. Two of them were striding up to the Cadillac, not bothering to shoot since they had yet to be threatened.

Ian pulled out his pistol and fired a shot at each of them. One shot missed completely, while the other must have grazed one man's shoulder, since blood started to seep through his clothing shortly after.

He tried to fire again, but his magazine had run out of rounds. He ducked down to reload—which only took a few seconds—and it was then that he noticed Mark wasn't shooting.

"What are you doing?" he hissed. "If you're here, help me!"

Mark's expression was completely determined as he said, "I'm not shooting them."

Ian finished reloading and fired again. "Then give me your pistol and get out of my way," he growled.

"Ian," Mark said in his deep voice, putting a hand on the arm Ian was using to hold his pistol. "You don't have to shoot them—"

"Fischbach," Ian said, his eyebrows knitting, "if there were a different way to do this, I would do it. Okay? We don't have time for this." He pulled away and peered over the car's hood to fire again.

"Ian!" Anthony called from somewhere a few yards away.

Ian ducked down again, having incapacitated one of the people, and looked to the source of Anthony's voice. He seemed to be behind the crushed carcass of Mark's blue sedan.

"Catch!" Anthony called, and appeared from behind the vehicle briefly before tossing Ian's shotgun at him and crouching again to avoid getting shot.

Ian tracked the shotgun with his eyes and stepped forward when it came to him, tossing his pistol aside in order to catch it. The weapon landed heavily in his arms and he swung it around to his shoulder. He loaded a magazine—which he had on his belt with his pistol holster—into it and shot at the men in front of the truck again.

"Anthony, take this," he called, and swept his pistol off the ground. He waited for his friend to appear, and as soon as he saw Anthony's head pop up above the roof of the sedan, he put the safety on the gun and tossed it over.

Anthony had caught it and shot a man down in less than two seconds.

Ian knew he and Mark couldn't hide behind the car forever. The men from the truck were closing in on them, and if they got to the other side of the car, things would get tricky.

Unfortunately, Ian never got time to think about it.


	3. Chapter 3

If Ian Hecox hadn't noticed the grenade, Mark would have been blown to bits.

Mark didn't ever get time to think about anything. Everything happened so fast, he only started to process things after the fact.

Something hit the wall behind them and fell to the floor. Ian turned and only got a millisecond-long glance at it before shouting, "Mark! Grenade!"

Those words hadn't gotten time to sink in before Ian was hauling Mark up by the collar of his jacket and shoving him out from behind the Cadillac. It was then that the younger man finally came to his senses and started to move. He ran for the other side of the tunnel, hearing bullets fly past him until he rounded the front of the truck and got out of their range.

The grenade exploded behind them and Mark heard pieces of metal go flying. He whipped around to find Ian, but he was already there beside him.

"Fuck," Mark said breathlessly, chest heaving as he tried to breathe through his panic and adrenaline. "That was close."

Ian nodded vaguely. "If they have more of those, we might be screwed." He finally looked at Mark. His eyes were gray in the lighting of the tunnel, though honestly Mark didn't really know what color they usually were. "You have to help me and Anthony. I understand that you don't want to hurt anyone, but we already told you about that when you agreed to help us. You're here. So help. Please."

Mark took a deep breath and nodded. "I'll see what I can do. But I'm not as experienced as you two are."

"That's fine. We just need the extra gun power."

It seemed like an insensitive thing to say, and maybe it was, but Mark didn't think much of it. Somehow he was still managing to give Ian excuses for being a douche now and again.

"Alright, get your gun ready," Ian said. "We've gotta go out there."

"Don't worry about me," Mark said, shoving the magazine back into place in his pistol and readying a bullet in the chamber. "I've got an idea."

Ian frowned. "Don't do something stupid. Anthony does that all the time to me and I hate it."

Mark couldn't help but smirk slightly. He didn't say anything, though, before climbing onto the hood of the delivery truck and clambering up to the top of the vehicle. He pulled out his second pistol, loading it and cocking it before making his next move. One of the gunmen below looked up, saw him, and with a shout, he turned and raised his gun.

Mark was too fast for him. He dropped off the top of the truck and landed right behind the man who was about to shoot him. He looped his right arm around the man's neck, using his left to shoot the nearest person in the leg. The man in front of him struggled and dug his heel into Mark's foot, but Mark did his best not to budge. No one was willing to shoot at him for risk of hitting their comrade, and he had the upper hand.

For a few seconds.

The man he was holding around the neck finally realized something he could do and he jammed his elbow back into Mark's stomach. Mark doubled over, accidentally pulling the man down with him, but the man just stepped back out of Mark's grasp. Mark caught sight of the man's gun and he immediately spun away from his line of aim. He grabbed the inside of the man's wrist and hammered his fist into the back of his elbow, feeling the arm give way and break. The man screamed in pain and backed away from Mark, turning and starting to run.

Mark let him go and spun around to fire at the person he heard behind him. He stopped, though, when he saw the man didn't actually have a weapon. He'd been trying to catch Mark by surprise—as soon as he knew Mark saw him, he was helpless.

Mark's act didn't waver. "Run, or I'll fire," he growled.

He didn't have to tell him twice.

Mark only then realized that Ian had just gotten disarmed. One of the last men still standing had attacked him from behind, it seemed, and knocked Ian's shotgun away from him. The man was drawing a pistol now and Ian had nothing to do about it.

Mark raised his gun and stepped into the armed man's line of sight.

They'd reached a stalemate. The man looked over to Mark, his expression giving Mark no clue as to what move he'd make.

Ian caught Mark's gaze, his eyes surprisingly calm, and he lifted his right eyebrow slightly. He seemed to be telling Mark to prepare to do something. Then he called out, "Anthony, go get the case!" His gaze whipped back to Mark and Mark realized he wanted him to shoot now.

But Mark couldn't, and half a second later, the man's pistol had fired into Ian's chest.

_v_

Anthony had taken down as many people as he needed to when he heard Ian tell him to find the case. He looked up, holstering his pistol, until he saw what was going on.

His hand had barely gotten to his gun when the shot rang out and he saw Ian's figure double over in pain. A split-second later, Mark must have fired, because blood burst from the man's chest and he collapsed to the asphalt.

Anthony ran over to Ian. "Oh god, Ian?"

"I'm okay," Ian said through clenched teeth and a tight wince. "Fine. I just—" He flinched as he tried to straighten, and stayed bent over, his hands covering the wound about four inches to the left of his solar plexus. "I just can't stand up."

Anthony glanced back at Mark, who hadn't moved. The dark-haired man had dropped both his pistols and was staring blankly at the dead man on the ground. Anthony's memory flashed back to a part of his life he tried hard to forget. He killed someone once….

With a snarl, Anthony threw the memory aside and turned on Mark. "What the hell were you thinking?"

Mark shook his head, his gaze still fixated on the man.

"What were you thinking?" he demanded again, shoving Mark in the chest with both hands, mostly just so he'd stop staring.

Mark stepped back reflexively and reacted seemingly without thinking, catching Anthony's wrist and twisting his arm around, which, though not painful, forced Anthony to bend over. Mark released him immediately upon realizing what he was doing.

Anthony never considered his action before pulling back and punching toward Mark's face.

The masked man caught his fist midair.

Anthony's voice came from the back of his throat. "Let go of me. How could you—"

"Anthony…." he heard Ian's pained voice behind him protest.

Mark was fighting to keep his expression stable. "I didn't react fast enough, I'm sorry. Please lay off me for just—a couple minutes."

Anthony noticed the tears that Mark had in his eyes then, and suddenly he lost all his anger. Mark dropped Anthony's fist and turned away. Anthony hesitated for a moment before going back to Ian's side. The wounded man had sat down and was still clutching his side, blood flowing through his fingers and soaking through his shirt down to his hip.

Anthony knelt in front of him. "Ian?"

Ian's eyes lifted to meet Anthony's. "You—you shouldn't have gotten after Mark like that. I know he's an idiot, but do you blame him?"

Anthony looked away. "I know I shouldn't have. I'm sorry. But that—"

"Don't apologize to me," Ian said, jerking his chin toward Mark. "Apologize to him."

Anthony felt beyond horrible now, but he tried not to let it show. "That's not our problem right now, Ian. You're hurt and I don't know how to get you to medical care."

"I'm fine," Ian said, all the feisty vehemence that would usually accompany the words gone. "Will someone please go get that damn case so this all won't have been in vain?"

Anthony nodded and stood, starting to turn toward the truck. He heard Ian groan in pain behind him and he turned back. "I shouldn't leave you."

Ian was already pale and sweaty and Anthony knew he wasn't going to last long without medical care.

Suddenly, the truck started to move behind Anthony and he turned to face it, startled. Mark was a few feet away, clearly as clueless as Anthony.

The truck only rolled along slowly at first, scraping against the side of the tunnel, but then it swerved away from the edge and started to pick up speed. Anthony hadn't started to consider what he could do about it before Mark took off running after it.

Everything clicked in Anthony's brain then. Someone who hadn't gotten shot had made their way back into the vehicle and was trying to take off with the case. The back of the truck was still open and now, as Mark caught up to it, he was able to dive into the empty space beyond.

The truck exited the tunnel and Anthony lost sight of it.

"What the hell just happened?" Ian asked.

Anthony frowned after the truck and its masked pursuer. "I think he's going to get that case."

"He just jumped in the back of it?"

Anthony nodded and stepped back to Ian. "Ian, I don't know what I can do for you. I can't bring an ambulance to this place. Not after all the shit we've done to these people. But I can't get you back to the organization's medical care in time."

Ian shut his eyes tightly and didn't respond. Anthony looked to his best friend's torso, where Ian's leather jacket had halfway shifted to cover the wound. Anthony brushed the clothing aside to see the wound and gently pulled Ian's hands away from it.

The bullet had hit Ian's chest far enough to the side that it seemed it had gone straight through. More than likely, there was no shrapnel left inside him, but given the position of the wound, there was a possibility his—Anthony took a moment to remember where the organs of the body were—his liver and large intestine were damaged.

"Anthony?"

He looked up from Ian's wound to his distressed face. "Yeah?"

"I wasn't ready for this. I—I've never been shot this badly before."

Anthony glanced back and forth between Ian's eyes and hesitated for only a moment before wrapping him gently in a hug. "I'll get you to a hospital, Ian. I swear to God."

Ian forced a smile and nodded. "I believe you."


	4. Chapter 4

Ian didn't actually notice when Mark Fischbach came back. Most of his time was spent concentrating on not thinking about the pure misery that radiated from his side as Anthony helped him back to his partly-crushed vehicle.

"I got your case back," Mark's voice said flatly from behind Ian and Anthony.

Anthony paused to let Ian unloop his arm from around Anthony's shoulders and lean against the car before turning to Mark.

Mark was holding the black case that was the whole reason they were there. It looked completely undamaged except a scratch along the corner. Ian suddenly had a hard time remembering why it was so important.

Anthony took the case without saying anything and he and Mark stood for a moment, maintaining an eye contact that Ian couldn't read. Then Mark looked down and turned away. Anthony put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Thank you. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry for all the shit that's happened today."

Mark just glanced at him, nodded, and brushed his hand away. He turned to Ian. "I—"

"No," Ian said immediately. "Whatever you're going to say, just—no. You have enough of your own problems to deal with. Don't think about me; I'll be fine."

"I'm sorry," Mark said anyway. "I don't have a way to express that enough."

Ian just shook his head and opened the car door to get in. "Mark, can you drive a stick-shift?"

The younger man frowned and nodded.

"Good, because Anthony sucks at it. We all have to pile in here anyway because I assume your car isn't in driving condition?"

Mark raised his eyebrows. "No. And it wasn't even my car."

Ian tried to sit down in the car as gently as possible, but the pain was excruciating and he was starting to feel dizzy and nauseous. As soon as he'd dropped into the passenger-side back seat, he almost lost consciousness. Any last attempts he could make at acting normal were erased. He sat almost doubled over on himself, since leaning over helped ease the pain slightly.

He wasn't sure exactly when the other two got in the car. But he heard the last door slam and Anthony's voice say from beside and above him, "We're good. Drive."

His mind stopped processing after that.

_v_

Ian and Anthony had been in the ER for around an hour now and Mark was still sitting in the waiting room. He figured the likelihood of him actually getting to go into the hospital room was pretty slim.

He didn't think this was a good thing, because it left him too much time to think.

Mark Fischbach had been without this feeling for a long time. It was the feeling of having no idea what to do with yourself; having no idea who you were or what you were doing with your life.

He'd felt it before, but it had been years. And he hadn't missed it.

One of the lesser things on his mind was his YouTube channel, but he hadn't failed to realize he'd only uploaded one video that day.

He knew that he'd never do this again. He may have been willing to help the duo formerly known as Smosh once, but while they'd had very limited interactions back when all three of them were YouTubers, they'd never been friends. He didn't owe them anything.

Mark felt terrible to know that what he'd done today was the sort of shit they had to go through all the time, but it wasn't enough motivation for him to help them by joining along. He'd shot someone. He'd killed someone today. And there was no way for him to cope with that, much less that _on top_ of the fact that he'd let Ian get shot.

He had videos to make and an audience of 15 million people to guide in the right direction. That was what he knew how to do and it was what he wanted to devote his life to.

Not this.

"Mark?"

He looked up at Anthony, who must have approached without Mark noticing.

"You might as well stop waiting out here; they're not going to let you in."

Mark nodded. "That's fine. I'm…not sure I want to be in there, honestly. And I can't imagine why Ian would want to see me."

"He's not going to hold anything against you," Anthony told him, sitting down in the empty plastic chair beside him. "We still succeeded in our mission, and sometimes…." He sighed. "Sometimes that's what's most important to him." He looked at Mark. "We would have been fucked if it weren't for you."

Mark just shrugged. He understood the importance of the case he'd retrieved. If he hadn't gotten it, and instead it had fallen into the wrong hands, Ian, Anthony, and probably a lot of other people would have been killed.

But somehow he couldn't use that to justify the fact that he'd murdered someone.

He noticed Anthony cringe slightly about the last words he'd said. "Well…we _might _have been fucked."

Mark frowned. "What?"

Anthony winced again and looked at his hands, folded in his lap. "I, uh—remember when someone from the organization called while we were waiting to get Ian into a room?"

Mark nodded, still unsure of where this was going.

"I talked to her and she said….Okay, there _was _some really important information in that case and there _is _a possibility that if those people had taken it to wherever they were going to take it to, we would have all died. But the case was locked. Really, really well. She said the likelihood of anyone but the organization actually getting into it was very slim."

Mark stared at him for a moment. "Then why the hell did they want you to go after it?"

Anthony's hands clenched into fists. "Because that's what they do. They have us do useless things for no fucking reason." He shook his head and took a breath. "I shouldn't say that. Nothing we've ever done for them is useless. It's just—never what I wanted to do with my life."

"Why are you still doing it, then?"

Anthony sighed. "Everyone asks that. It's because we don't really have a choice. Even if the organization let us leave, they'd have almost no one else to do this shit, and sometimes what we do actually saves lives."

Mark looked at him for moment. "I'm not going to preach to you. But you do have control over your own life. If you want to get away from that organization, you can do it."

Anthony glanced away, fidgeting slightly, before regaining composure and standing up. He said, "I know. Sorry, Mark, this is stupid. You shouldn't be here trying to make _me _feel better about something when you've been through more shit today than I have and I know you must feel terrible."

All of Mark's anguish came flooding back and he involuntarily started to run a hand through his hair, something he often did when he was stressed or upset. "I was…doing fine with a distraction, actually, but—thank you for thinking of me. I've got to home now. I—I have a life to get back to, I guess."

Anthony nodded, then frowned. "Are you sure you don't want to try to get into a room here? All I did was touch you up with a first-aid kit. You probably need medical attention, dude."

Mark nodded. "I know. And I'll get some. But I'll do that when I get back to LA. Hey," he said, standing to pull a folded piece of paper from his pocket and hold it out to Anthony, "will you give this to Ian? I won't get to see him again, so I wrote some shit down because I—I couldn't have said what I needed to to his face anyway. I feel—I feel so horrible about my lack of action and I realize this only temporary and he's going to live, but…." He shook his head, combing his fingers through his hair one more time before dropping his hand to his side. "I just had some things to say and nothing to do while I was out here, so I wrote it down."

Anthony nodded and took the paper, slipping it into his back pocket. "I'll give it to him. Thanks for your help, Mark, and I'm sorry again."

_v_

Anthony got to see Ian one more time before nightfall. His best friend was groggy and slightly disoriented from being drugged, and he was asleep at first when Anthony entered.

While he waited for Ian to come around, Anthony unfolded the paper Mark had given him and skimmed through it, not really sure if it was an intrusion of privacy or if Mark hadn't really cared, since he'd given it to Anthony in the first place. It wasn't a particularly long letter, but as Anthony read it, he knew it wasn't going to make Ian feel any better. Mark's words were kind, but they were full of repent and guilt and Anthony figured that Ian would feel bad and want to talk to Mark about it, which of course, he couldn't do, since Mark was probably already a few miles away.

Ian stirred on the bed and opened his gunmetal blue eyes. He noticed immediately that Anthony was sitting a few feet away and looked over at him.

"Hey, Ian."

"Hey." Ian repositioned so he could see Anthony better. "Wow, I—I actually don't feel that much pain right now."

Anthony smiled. "Well, you've gotta be on at least a dozen drugs right now."

"Really? Yeah, I guess I feel it. Goddamn, I'm kind of lightheaded."

"I've got a lot I need to tell you, Ian, but….I think I'm going to save most of it until you're out of here. You'll know why when I tell you."

Anthony figured that under normal circumstances, Ian would demand to know what he wasn't telling him, but this time, he just nodded.

"How long have I been here?" Ian asked, catching sight of the sunset-painted sky from through the blinds.

"A few hours. You probably don't remember much in the waiting room, either. You kept coming in and out of consciousness. So we've been in the hospital for about three hours."

"Where's Mark, then?"

Anthony glanced down at the paper in his hand and then back to Ian. "He left twenty minutes or so ago. Headed back to LA."

"Oh. I guess that makes sense."

Silence slithered between them, twisting back and forth until Anthony finally spoke. "You really scared me on the way here, Ian. You looked like shit."

Ian attempted a vague smile, saying, "I bet I still do."

"But I thought you were actually going to die on me." Anthony started to speak without thinking. "I held your head on my lap in the car, and you almost heaved a couple times and you kept moaning and having troubles breathing…. It was—just one of the most terrifying things I've ever been through." He felt embarrassed, suddenly, to have said all that, and he hoped Ian was too drugged to remember it in the morning.

Ian didn't look at him. "Yeah. I'd…say sorry, but it wasn't my fault, so that wouldn't do anything."

"You don't have to say anything. I'm just glad you're okay now. Or at least that you're going to be okay soon."

Ian smiled wearily and closed his eyes. "I wish I could have gotten to talk to Mark. This really probably isn't as bad as he thought it was."

Anthony looked at the paper again and considered handing it to Ian. Instead, he said, "Visiting hours are almost over. I should leave."

"Thanks for everything, Anthony," Ian said, quite casually, his eyes still closed.

Anthony smiled. "Any time."

As he left the room, he discreetly dropped the paper into the trash can. Never to be seen by whom it was written for.


End file.
